Ars Technica reports that the enterprise-oriented 3.5-inch hard drive, which is not yet commercially available, is similar in scope and function to Western Digital HGST’s own 10TB drive, but the latter has been selling helium-laden devices since 2013.

The reason why helium is significant is that, as it is lighter than air, in a sealed container, it produces less friction, thereby improving power efficiency and reliability. In Seagate’s drive, this drove Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) from 2 to 2.5 million hours, and allowed an additional platter to be inserted into the drive, increasing capacity to 10TB in both companies’ products.

Ars reports that two versions of Seagate’s product, at 6Gb/s SATA and 12Gb/s SAS have only limited release to Alibaba and Huawei, but they are expected to cost around $800.

It looks like Seagate is leaving behind EVault in 2016. Boston, MA-based Carbonite Inc. announced it has acquired the storage vendor's and disaster recovery business for $14 million. Carbonite itself is a cloud and hybrid

Storage vendor Western Digital has announced it has acquired SanDisk in a deal worth around $19 billion. The offer, announced Wednesday, pegs SanDisk shares at $86.50 each, 15 per cent higher than the company's